Tentative Agreement for Contract Extension

[Update: This summer, we sent an email to members of United Academics regarding our intent to enter into negotiations with UO administration. Below is an overview of were we are currently in that process.]

Late last week, we were able to reach a tentative agreement with the administration for a two-year extension to the Collective Bargaining Agreement. We will be holding a ratification vote later this month. The agreement will only be finalized upon approval of a majority of voting members. This email contains a short summary of the agreement, followed by a longer explanation and a link to the tentative agreement. This tentative agreement is not to be confused with the final 3% average raise from our current contract which consists of a 2.25% merit pool and 0.75% across-the-board raise and will take effect on January 01, 2018.

Tentative Agreement

Short summary: We agreed to a raise package for the 2018-19 and 2019-2020 years. This tentative contract extension reflects our desire to sustain salary growth & stability and correct observed inequities, even amid a highly constrained state and university budget context. Our current contract expires on June 30, 2018, but still includes a 3% raise package that goes into effect this coming January 01, 2018. The tentative contract extension builds on UA’s consecutive five-years of salary increases and will provide two additional years of salary raises, which will take effect in January 2019 and January 2020.

1. In the first year (beginning January 2019), the agreement is for a pool of money equal to 2.0% of the total salaries for the tenure-track faculty. The pool will be split between a 1.25% across-the-board raise for all TTF, and a .75% pool of money to address observed salary inequities by protected classes.

2. For the NTTF in the first year, there will be a 2.0% across-the-board raise.

3. In the second year (beginning January 2020), the TTF will have a pool of money equivalent to 2.125% of TTF salaries. This pool will be split between a 1.625% merit pool, and a .5% external equity pool.

4. In the second year, NTTF will have a 2.125% merit pool.

Detailed explanation:

1. In the first year, the agreement is for a pool of money equal to 2.0% of the total salaries for the tenure-track faculty. The pool will be split between a 1.25% across-the-board raise for all TTF, and a .75% pool of money to address observed salary inequities by protected classes.

We are currently engaged with the administration to complete an analysis of TTF salaries to determine if there are inequities due to gender, race, or ethnicity. The .75% pool will be used to address any inequities uncovered through the analysis. A pool of .75% of TTF salaries is roughly $500,000. We have agreed with the administration that, should this pool not be enough to compensate for all of the inequities uncovered, the university will make up the difference. If, however, there are fewer inequities than we expect, any money left in the pool after adjustments will be put into the across-the-board pool and distributed to all tenure-track faculty.

2. For the NTTF in the first year, there will be a 2.0% across-the-board raise.

We talked with the university about an equity pool for the NTTF, but, in the end, we agreed that a study of NTTF diversity equity issues would be a difficult undertaking, given the diversity of jobs NTTFs perform. We firmly believe that there are diversity inequities in our NTTF ranks that need to be addressed, but the administration very much wanted to focus on TTF issues first.

3. In the second year, the TTF will have a pool of money equivalent to 2.125% of TTF salaries. This pool will be split between a 1.625% merit pool, and a .5% external equity pool.

Again, the TTF agreement is more complicated than the NTTF because we wanted to address another equity issue – external equity. One of the earliest issues of concern for tenure-track faculty when the union was first forming was the university’s failure to live up to the promises made in the 2000 Senate White Paper on salaries. Our campus was nominally committed to raising salaries so that our departments were earning at least 90% of the salaries earned by their AAU peers.

Our initial raise package certainly helped most departments achieve this goal. Unfortunately, some units started out so far behind their comparators that the regular course of raises was, and would continue to be, not enough to catch up to their comparators. Every time we have bargained with the administration, we have pushed to rectify the situation with external equity raises. We have finally been able to do that.

In fall 2019, the union and the university will examine the latest data from the AAU Publics and compare the average AAU salary to our salaries by department and rank. Every faculty member who is in a department and rank where the average salary is less than 90% of their AAU peers, will receive a raise from the .5% external equity pool. We will meet with the admin to decide the best way to adjust salaries based on how many faculty qualify and how much money we have to distribute. Currently, about 1/3 of the TTF are in departments and ranks that earn less than 90% of their AAU peers and we estimate an average equity raise of about 2%.

You can see if you would currently qualify for an external equity raise by checking your department and rank.

Of the rest of the 2.125% TTF salary pool, 1.625%, will be distributed as a merit raise. Your unit merit policies will determine the process for allocating raises to individual faculty from those pools.

4. In the second year, NTTF will have a 2.125% merit pool.

The NTTF will have a 2.125% merit raise. Again, we tried to figure out a way to have an external equity pool for non-tenure track faculty, but the data is just not there. Not only is it not collected in any systematic way, but the fact that universities all use NTTF titles differently makes cross-university comparisons extremely difficult.

We are also aware than many NTTF are not fans of merit raises. It is fair to say that not every unit has figured out ideal ways to measure and evaluate NTTF work. This lack of accuracy can make the distribution of merit raises seem random or based solely on student evaluations. These are real concerns and we are continuing to work with Academic Affairs to bring more clarity and precision to the merit evaluations for NTTF.

Many NTTF, conversely, do like merit raises, and merit raises are an established part of academic life at top-tier research universities. We think it is valuable to have our NTTF and TTF raise packages mirror each other as closely as possible, and we resolutely refuse to accept the idea that our NTTF somehow make less of a contribution to the success of our research mission.

The negotiations with the university over this extension took place throughout this summer. We engaged in a relatively quick and quiet negotiation process with the university because both parties thought that a contract extension made sense in our current unsettled university climate. The state of the university’s budget it still abysmal and the additional pressure from the state about PERS funding has not helped. Many of you may recall the proposed double-digit tuition hikes and the woeful support from the state to cover university operating costs. The failure to find new revenue at the state level threatens higher education with continued pressure to increase tuition, which is something we have stood against. Recall that Oregon sits near the bottom in spending for higher education in the U.S. and in corporate tax receipts. This bind will continue to pose challenges to the UO and public education in Oregon. Additionally, volatility in US immigration policy (see how nicely we put that?) has lead to deep concerns about the numbers of international students who will attend the university in the next few years. We also wanted to give our new Provost a chance to get a handle on his job before we entered into full-fledged negotiations with the university. The University of Oregon is not the typical research university, we have a strong commitment to shared governance and a deep respect for the work of the NTTF. We wanted to give Provost Banavar time to learn who we are before we bargained over sometimes contentious issues.

We are very aware that there are pressing issues that need to be addressed. Job stability for NTTF, both in length of employment and in assignment, still needs to be improved. Support for faculty with children is woefully lacking. The service that all faculty do is still extremely undervalued. Before we agreed to negotiate an extension, the Provost’s Office pledged to work with us over the next two years on these issues and more. We are putting some faith in the Provost’s Office, but we believe that they are committed to finding solutions to help build a better university.